From the luminous 19th-century canvases of Thomas Cole to the panoramic photographs of Ansel Adams, depictions of the American West traditionally meant romanticized scenes of snow- capped peaks, sweeping plains and pine forests.
But in the 1970s, Robert Adams quietly began recording a new West, where once-pristine vistas were invaded by tract housing, franchise restaurants and parking lots — a phenomenon not unlike what was occurring elsewhere in the United States.
While such images of seeming banality have since become a staple of contemporary photography, they were a radical departure at the time.
“No one was doing it,” said Joshua Chuang, assistant curator of photographs at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Conn. “He was seen as an odd bird by many for pointing his camera in that direction.
“But as soon as he realized that that was as much the reality of our life as the mountains and the plains, there was no turning back. Because no one else was paying attention to it, he had to.”
The Aperture Foundation has recently released a second reissue of Adams’ now-classic book, “The New West” (124 pages, $45). Originally published in 1974, it slowly changed the face of photography and launched this gentle revolutionary on an extraordinary, still-unfolding career.
The book’s 56 black-and-white photographs, all shot around 1968-70 along the Front Range where Adams resided at the time, present reserved, unassuming views of development encroaching on the Colorado landscape, each image building on the next.
Among the scenes are a patch of weeds on a barren Interstate 25 embankment, a newly completed tract house in Colorado Springs and a mostly empty shopping center parking lot with the distant Denver skyline in the background.
“He uses the language of just sort of straight pictures,” Chuang said. “The pictures are not fancy in any way. They’re very sophisticated, they’re very intelligent, but they’re plain-spoken like his prose.”
Adams traces the origins of his interest in such seemingly unlikely subject matter to his time in the late ’50s and early ’60s as an undergraduate and graduate student in Southern California, where he witnessed the rise of the automobile and the domination of suburban culture.
“My parents lived in Wheat Ridge,” he said, “and as I would return to see them, it struck me increasingly that what I saw in California was popping up in Colorado, and that was really difficult to accept.
“As a teenager, I’d climbed and run rivers and camped, and I worked in the Forest Service. It all mattered a lot to me. And to see this beginning to be diluted and poisoned and misshapen really did seem to call for some kind of response.”
Adams, 71, a 1994 winner of a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” has to be counted among the key American artists of the latter third of the 20th century, because he forever altered the way not just photographers but artists of all kinds perceive the physical world around them.
“There’s no one working in any form of landscape photography today whose work has not been affected by Robert Adams, or if it hasn’t been, it’s not any good,” said Jeffrey Fraenkel, president of San Francisco’s Fraenkel Gallery, which has long represented the photographer.
Among the most significant artists who have spent a major portion of their lives in Colorado, Adams, a New Jersey native, moved with his family from Madison, Wis., to Wheat Ridge at age 15. He graduated from Wheat Ridge High School in 1955.
After studies in California, he got a job in 1962 teaching English at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Soon thereafter, a friend returning from a stint in the Army suggested he give photography a try, and Adams did.
What started as a hobby soon became more serious and far-reaching, as he perused back issues of such journals as Aperture and Camera Work and found a supportive mentor in Colorado Springs photographer Myron Wood.
Among the first people in the photography world to recognize the importance of Adams’ groundbreaking vision was John Szarkowski, the legendary director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
After meeting Adams in 1969, he bought four of the then-unknown photographer’s works for the museum and included them in a new acquisitions show the following year. Even more important, he agreed to write a foreword for “The New West,” a critical impetus to getting it published.
The prestigious Fraenkel Gallery began representing him right after it opened in September 1979 and has presented an exhibition of his work about every two years since.
But Fraenkel said it was tough going at first. The pictures were priced at about $250 and were very difficult to sell. It took about 15 years for a solid appreciation to take hold.
“The reigning god of photography was the other Adams,” Fraenkel said. “For the few collectors who existed, Ansel was the Adams they wanted, and Bob’s work is the opposite — small, true and not romantic.”
After spending 1970-71 in Denver, so Adams’ wife, Kerstin, could earn a master’s degree in library science at the University of Denver, the couple settled in Longmont. In 1997, they moved to Astoria, Wash., a town of 10,000 people at the mouth of the Columbia River.
Despite the revered place Adams holds in the photography world, he remains underappreciated among the general public. But that is likely to change soon.
In January 2005, the Yale University Art Gallery announced its purchase of 1,465 master prints of Adams photographs and an agreement to acquire similar prints of all his future work. When combined with a series it previously acquired, the museum posesses a complete holding of his life’s work.
It plans to republish three Adams books, including “Denver” and “What We Bought: The New World, Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area,” as well as a three-volume career overview and a smaller one for general consumption.
In addition, Yale is organizing a retrospective of at least 200 of Adams’ images that is expected to begin touring in the fall of 2010. The institution is in discussions with the Denver Art Museum about being a possible stop.
“Obviously, I hope it happens,” Adams said, “because I deeply care about Denver and the region, and, as my wife will testify, I’m periodically swept by intense homesickness, so I’m hoping that it works.”
At the same time the photographer subtly critiques humanity’s damaging incursion into the landscape in “The New West,” he simultaneously found in it what Chuang calls an “uneasy beauty.”
“On the one hand,” Adams said said, “Colorado will always be a place for me of deeply moving beauty, but it’s also a place where our sense of stewardship has failed dramatically.
“Even now, as I look at some at some of those scenes, I’m sometimes very, very sad and disappointed by what it turns it out we’ve made of this remarkable place.”
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
Coffee Table
THE NEW WEST: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range, by Robert Adams and John Szarkowski, $45
